Mathieu Doyon and Simon Rivest founded the artists’ collective Doyon-Rivest in Quebec City in 2000. Their practice extends well beyond their training in visual art and graphic design. Their work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Canada and abroad at venues including the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, the Manif d’art in Quebec City, the International Photography Biennial in Amsterdam and Contact Festival in Toronto. The duo live and work in Montreal.

Communication is a pillar of the system in which we live. It shapes our identity. In addition, the channels of communication and the way we use them are constantly evolving. In this context, our duo creates artworks which raise questions by mixing up established codes and shaking up semantic fields. We generate empty spaces and short circuits out of which beauty and poetry emerge.

Visually, our works adopt a polished aesthetic, free of artifice. This is the result of a long exploration of consumerism’s enticement mechanisms and of our thinking about the importance of perfection in the image. It is also our way of rooting our work as artists in today’s society.

Our practice is not defined by a medium or a technique but rather by our vision and our ideas. As a result, our works do not unfold in a long reassuring line but develop instead in an organic and eclectic manner. Reflecting the age in which we live, which offers us a multitude of sources of inspiration and opportunities to create, our body of work is made up of photographs, installations, videos, sculptures and public art.

Working as a duo is an integral part of our project. This way of working debunks the myth of the “artist’s creative genius” and makes communication between us essential. This has the immediate effect of enriching the intuition of each of us.

For Doyon-Rivest, in the end, to make an artistic gestureis to communicate.